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Dessert

Excellent Light Puffs

A small, lightly flavored puff made with flour, lemon peel, nutmeg, brandy, sugar, eggs, fried in lard and served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Excellent Light Puffs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, lemon peel, nutmeg, brandy, loaf sugar, and 1 egg.

  2. Beat the mixture in a mortar with 5 eggs (whites and yolks).

Fry and serve

  1. Heat lard in a frying pan until hot.

  2. Drop a tablespoon of batter into the hot lard and fry until golden brown, turning as needed.

  3. Serve immediately with sweet sauce.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Nutmeg + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and, with the whites beaten in, give the puffs their light, airy structure.
Flour
Provides the starch that sets during frying, giving the puffs body.
Lard
Hot fat that cooks the batter quickly and browns the outside of each puff.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the outside brown during frying.

The step that matters

Frying the batter in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy and heavy instead of puffing and browning. Frying in small drops gives each puff room to cook through evenly.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, nutmeg, brandy, sugar, egg, sauce):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, nutmeg, brandy, sugar, egg, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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